Remember how baffling, terrifying, and sad childhood really was? New Yorker and Playboy cartoonist Gahan Wilson does, and thanks to him we can laugh at it. In Nuts, his series of one-page stories published in the National Lampoon's "Funny Pages" section throughout the 1970s, the master of the macabre eschewed his usual ghouls, vampires, and end-of-the-world scenarios for a wry, pointed memoir of growing up "normal" in the endlessly weird real world. The collected strips form a virtual Gahan Wilson graphic novel, as his stoic, hunting-cap-wearing protagonist (known only as "The Kid") copes with illness, disappointment, strange old relatives, the disappointment of Christmas, life-threatening escapades, death, school, and the awfulness of camp.

"Gahan Wilson's Nuts is the best, most clear-eyed explanation of and memoir about childhood I've ever read. Small, cramped, perfect drawings that show children as they are—explorers without a map or a book of instructions in the land of mad giants."—Neil Gaiman